Life's too short, get the dog

The whole world is going through a huge transition period as we adjust to living with coronavirus (I’m sick of the word)… But what’s strange is that this external shift seems to have triggered a huge re-evaluation of our personal lives. 

Sitting in the silence of isolation, we decided to move to Spain, start a family, fuck that boy off, buy the car, get the dog, quit the job.

Our collective strength has been truly dazzling to witness. What we, the masses, could be capable of if we set our intentions is mind-blowing. Just a (woke) thought.

Note: All of the decisions listed above are real and were made by myself or someone I love during lockdown (not naming any names). Of course, one I can claim is ‘get the dog’. My little Willow has been home now for almost a month now, and she’s a dream.

I wanted to tell you about what it’s like trying to create (force) a blended family of dogs and cats…

We lost our furry sister Melody on the 7^th February. For so many, that earth-shattering loss is enough to put them off ever getting another dog, but I shared the purest love with Melody for 13 years. Why would I deprive myself of love because I was scared of loss? Very deep and very Shakespeare-esque, I know. And even though I pose this argument, I still cried all the way home from Wales the day I chose Willow.

While I endured an excruciating 5-week wait to pick her up, I read a lot about puppies. I learned some things, was reminded of others, and also had to wade through a lot of scare-mongering shit about how ‘some cats will NEVER learn to accept a dog’.

Now. I knew Sylvester and Atlas wouldn’t be best pleased, but they fight, they hunt and they’re confident boys. I knew they’d show Willow her place and teach her to live alongside them. All I could think of was Tiger Lily.

If you know me, you know Tiger Lily has a special place in my heart. My mum calls her ‘Princess Tiger Lily’ to tease her, but that’s just because she’s my best girl.

Tiger Lily is the epitome of the term ‘scaredy cat’. She took months to adapt to moving from Nottingham. She still refuses to use the catflap because of the noise it makes. She trusts nobody but me.

I was right to be worried. The night Willow came home, Sylvester retreated to the top of the fridge. Atlas hissed and spat from the top of the sofa. Tiger Lily… disappeared. For days. Eventually I was so upset I locked Willow in my room and walked down the road shouting her name like a real crazy cat lady. I did this every day for a week.

What made my heart ache even more was that every day, she came. She ran to me, meowing, so trusting even after such an awful betrayal. She’d rub against me, purr when I picked her up and follow me all the way back to the house. But no further. She ate her meat on the decking and she wouldn’t stay around for long.

One day, the storms came. My head was aching as I worked in the dining room and then, out of nowhere, thunder cracked the sky open and the heavens opened. Straight away, I felt sick. Tiger Lily hadn’t been in the house for well over a week by this point. I walked outside in the rain and shouted for her, and like every day, she came. She was wet through (and shouting about it).

She followed me all the way back to my car and took shelter underneath it. She wouldn’t come any further. She meowed harder. It felt like she was saying ‘please tell me it’s gone because I’m so cold and I really want to come home.’ I looked at her drenched little face under that car that day and I started to cry. I’ll be honest, I really thought I’d fucked it.

This was the breaking point for me, Willow and Tiger Lily. In that moment, a sense of calm came over me. I realised I couldn’t let her stay out here in the storm, no matter what. I went back inside and shut all the windows, now soaked to the skin myself.

I walked back to the car, let her rub her tiny head on my hand, and I managed to get hold of her and pull her into me. She was furious of course, but I couldn’t let her punish herself any longer. I took her in to mum’s room, gave her food and blocked the door. Then, I let Willow out.

…and do you know what? Tiger Lily went to sleep. For hours. She let me dry her and cuddle her in that time and didn’t even attempt to go back outside until the following day.

That night, I woke to the sound of purring beside my head, and I started to cry again (I’m a wettie, do keep up). Willow’s crate is beside my bed, and Tiger Lily was so happy to be home she didn’t care.

Here we are, two more weeks down the line and all the cats will walk past Willow without fear (but not without the occasional bop on the head when she gets too rambunctious).

Which makes me wonder – do those people who end up rehoming their cat or new puppy really care? Or have they just not invested enough time, energy and love in to making it work? I don’t know the answer, all I know is I’m so thankful that my babies are happy and safe. They truly make my life a brighter place.

The Isolation Room

‘Isolation’ just doesn’t have a very nice inflection. Contexts we’ve heard it in before:

• the room you’re put in in school when you’re really naughty
•     the room they put prisoners in in jail when they’ve been smearing shit on the walls

We ‘isolate’ problems, like a dog that’s bitten a kid, and now, a lung-eating virus that’s terrifying people the world over. I get it, but I can’t help looking at the connotations of the word ‘isolation’ and wondering what the fuck I’ve done to deserve this.

Spending my days running from one place to the next, late as you like (sorry Megs, Liv, grandad, Dan, work… and everyone else I’ve ever met) stops me from thinking so much. When left alone in silence, I begin to reflect on how pointless it all is. How crap I am. I cry more. I stop eating because I stop feeling hungry.

I’m well aware that I’m damaged (undoubtedly you are too in some way!). Still, I am NOT enjoying the wake-up call. My relationship with my family is, ehem, rocky at the best of times; we’re finding it difficult to be around one another 24/7, which is, in some ways, to be expected. It’s hard for us to understand what each other is going through because we deal with stress very differently.

I’m not enjoying working from home, but I’m glad I’m able to. I know some people are suffering much more, work-wise. My lovely Cellar is shut, and it’s been the bleakest week without the girls, Dee and Andy and our other wonderful regulars. I think when Boris said businesses had to close and I realised what that meant for the Cellar is when I first felt like our world was falling apart.

Then, I had to decide what to do about grandad. He is doing so well for 90, and can manage simple meals, basic cleaning and personal care just fine… But he doesn’t know how to arrange his medication in to his pill docket (he sometimes forgets to take it at all), he can’t keep the house hygienic on his own, he hurts himself maybe once a month and has had multiple infected wounds over the past year, he can’t prepare fresh meals… These are vital things that me and mum manage without thinking from one day to the next.

There’s also his mental health. He’s confused and deeply upset by what’s happening. He’s cried a lot over the past few weeks, at stupid things (he cried his eyes out at the end of The Greatest Showman the other day – unsure why). I think if he had no human contact at all for 12 weeks, he would lose his basic sense of what the hell was going on.

We’ve decided I’ll continue to go every day and look after the things I mentioned above, but keep 2m away from him, clean anything I touch, not eat or drink at the house and not stay longer than an hour. Bearing in mind the wider family relationships in the Hills clan are very tense, it caused me a LOT of heartache trying to open the dialogue and come to a resolution that was best for grandad. He’s trying to understand. He reaches out to touch me about 100x a day but I’ll keep at it to keep him safe.

In January, I joined the gym. I went 6 days a week for ten weeks and I’d also started doing yoga classes on Sundays and Mondays. I found so much joy in the time I spent working on my physical self, clearing my mind of anxiety and listening to shit music in my headphones like I used to before I could drive. It’s gutting that I can’t do that at the moment, but I try to do a bit of yoga or running every day. I don’t feel very motivated, but I’m trying to just force myself. It’s hard because there isn’t much floor space at mum’s so I have to do it outside if I have any hope of spreading my 5’8 self into a warrior 1.

I think what’s making me feel so down-and-out is not knowing how long I’ll have to do it for. I’m sure you all share this worry. A week or two I could make the best of, but 3 months seems insurmountable. I'm sure the amazing individuals working in the NHS and social care feel this weight on their shoulders a million times heavier than the rest of us, and my endless thanks goes out to them during this time.

Which brings me on to my final point. Don’t judge those who’ve turned to social media to feel a sense of contact with others. Don’t judge girls who want to do their make up to sit at home and do nothing. Just shut the fuck up and mind your own business. We’re all dealing with it differently, and some of us have never felt more alone in our lives.

The Marriage of Tulips and Sawdust

Like many of the best things about me, ‘Tulips and Sawdust’ came from my grandparents. Grandad is a carpenter by calling, and a bloody good one at that. He is incomplete without wood shavings coating his clothes, sitting in his eyebrows and floating around his ears (that’s probably why he’s so deaf – sawdust in his ears). Every day I take him in my arms and he smells like musty, glorious sawdust, which to me has come to smell like home.

Moreover, since 2002, April has covered the front garden of number 19 in a scattering of red. Nana planted dozens of tulips when they first came south, and to this day a few still erupt from the soil, greeting me with love as I pull up the drive in springtime.

I named my blog Tulips and Sawdust as an afterthought; it was supposed to be the name of my book, but I got too busy to write it. To be fair, I’m still busy, but I feel like now I’ve finished writing uni essays and settled in to a full-time job, it’d be meaningful to invest some time in a story very close to my heart. A story about a shipwright’s apprentice who knocked a young lady off her bike. A story of family, ground-shaking loss and a phoenix of love that took flight from a scattertube of ashes. Tulips and Sawdust will be the story of their lives, and of ours. For its author at least, it begins at the end.

Tulips and Sawdust

I stood among family, dressed head to toe in black. Amy was putting her mascara on my eyelashes because I didn’t have any of my own. Nasty stuff. Sticks your eyes together something terrible. When I turned back to the white wood mirror on mum’s dresser, I saw a witch; a green-eyed monster in a fancy-dress costume that didn’t quite fit either her body or the biting January morning. My hair was down because they told me it ‘looked nice’ but I bloody hated it itching at my neck and flying about when the wind blew.

The last week had passed with blurry edges, sickly and confusing, noisy and lonely. There were moments I knew I’d never forget no matter how hard I tried. First, the colour of my mum’s face when she came up to tell us that nana had died (white with green around the edges, like a lily). Then, the empty green armchair and the sobs that had come from the bottom of grandad’s tummy and shook his whole body on the way out. My 12-year-old brain just couldn’t understand why I had to put make up and kitten heels on to make more memories that would turn my stomach enough to wake me in the night. But I turned from the mirror and slipped my feet in to those black shoes anyway, waiting a moment before I joined the others in the stairwell of Ash Close.

I can’t remember how I got to the crem, and the next set of memories still come with a lump in my throat, so I don’t rehash them very much, but for you, I will. We walked to the door together, the sun high behind the clouds as morning waned to afternoon. There were people outside that I hadn’t seen in years. I loved them, I recognise that now. We all loved her. Some of us were crying already, others very obviously wanted to. As the adults talked in muted voices, I turned my gaze to the inside of Weston crematorium. My eyes took a second to adjust. The room was dim and heavy and frightened me more than anything I had ever seen in my life. Daniel was on my right, Mummy on my left, and that was the only reason I was able to put one shaky kitten heel in front of the other and walk to my seat.

It smelled like the church where we used to do our Christmas show at primary school – all churches are the same – woody and worn. I felt pathetic and miserable and waiting for ages watching the people I loved cry was making it ten times worse. There was a song book in front of me. Stupid, I thought again. Nobody feels like singing. I couldn’t see grandad at all, but truthfully, I wasn’t looking for him. I couldn’t take it just then, and I don’t think he could either. I have the grey green eyes of the Hills women. Of his sweetheart.

The coffin was unremarkable and yet it sent tremors through the room. Silence robbed us all of our words, our tears, the air in our lungs. The deadweight of our mum, our wife, our Nana… It was borne by the four boys.

…….

TBC

The Housing Crisis: A Chokehold on Love

Will I ever be able to afford to buy a house? This is the question that follows millennials around. For the most part (by no means without exception), we were born in to pleasant neighbourhoods; our parents offered realistic deposits and reasonable monthly repayments in exchange for the start of their adult lives. The total market value of our childhood homes was the same as what we are now expected to pay as a deposit for our own.

I will begin this post with an anecdote: as touched upon in previous posts, my mum left Sunderland to join her brothers down south in the year 2000, bringing with her a toddler, a newborn baby and very little else. At this stage in her life, she had frugal money from the sale of her and her ex-husband’s house and a part time administrative role. In spite of this, she was able to bypass renting almost entirely and secure a new home for the three of us on the sea front.

Over the course of the next few years, mum worked hard despite having two young children and ended up acquiring a mortgage for 31 Ash Close (a 3-bed semi in a lovely area, great local schools, transport links, etc). We were a single parent family and yet even as recently as the millennium we were able to access affordable housing.

These days, you’d struggle to convince a solicitor that you’d be able to meet the mortgage repayments even if you did manage to save up the astronomical deposit. As is painfully clear, if you were a 30-year-old woman with two dependant children and a modest income from a part-time job it would be almost impossible.

That is, unless you had a partner. Entering in to a relationship with someone is no longer propelled by compatible personalities and physical attraction, it also presents the tantalising prospect of a second income. In fact, I propose that modern dating and our consumerist world advocates looking for a mate based primarily on income.

As a young woman, I have been advised on multiple occasions to ‘marry a rich man’. NOTHING makes my teeth grit more than this comment. Marry a rich man Charlotte. Don’t even THINK about marrying for love.

Putting the blind fury to one side, it’s got me thinking. Why do my family and friends think this is good advice? The answer is cold but quite simple – they want me to have a house and holidays and a ‘nice life’. Without a solid second income, in the world as it is today, they know that I’ll never be able to own a beautiful house like the one I grew up in. I’ll have to bring up my children in rented homes until my parents die. Incredibly bleak.

So, what am I to do? Find a boyfriend with a great income. Fine. Then what? Move in with him even though I’m not ready because I’m 23 and getting too old to live at my mum’s?

This is the crux of my observations: in 2020, the housing crisis is forcing couples to move in together too soon because of financial constraints. Sadly, I think this naturally leads to more break ups, or worse, settling for someone long-term who doesn’t make you happy just because they can offer you stability. I know I have a reputation as a hopeless romantic (Taylor Swift fan, poet, English grad… the list undeniably goes on), but don’t we all deserve to spend our best years with a partner that enriches our lives? Don’t we all deserve genuine, passionate, grinning-like-an-idiot love?

Surely safe shelter is a basic human right. We are the first generation that doesn’t have (true) access to it. There are vacant buildings and residual fat cats from generations gone by who own multiple properties and let them out to us at extortionate prices. We’re on salaries that mean we can’t rent and save simultaneously. Fuck, most of us can’t even keep our heads above water most of the time. Even with two incomes it’s a struggle. But here is my point –  under the current government, with one, it is impossible. We move in with our parents or our partners… or we drown.

The OnlyFans Enigma

We enter the new decade with a renewed sense of purpose, a feverish enthusiasm to begin ‘living our best lives’. Whether this entails bagging a new job, travelling to new places or getting fitter, in our consumerist world its highly likely that it involves making and spending as much money as possible. 

Someone once told me (rightly or wrongly) that in order to be successful in life, you need to reflect on what services you can deliver well and sell them. For some people, their assets are their skills; they are ardent organisers, gifted artists or good with children. They possess a particularly logical brain or a natural talent for sport. One thing every single one of us have ownership over, though, is our own body.

I blithely consider myself a millennial snowflake, I really do, and I’d love for the underlying message of this post to be ‘do what you want, it’s your body’… But I just can’t shake my anxiety as I wait at the photocopier at work and overhear students (it’s an FE college so they’re 16-18) talking about posting nudes for money.

I think OnlyFans and similar platforms are the latest manifestations of a dangerous message: that human value is, above all else, youth, physicality and sexuality. In a social media obsessed generation, I find myself saddened by the poisonous effects of these sites on our self-esteems. The benchmark is becoming smoother, thinner, taller, curvier, more muscular, more tanned…

In this vein, OnlyFans represents yet another way for insecure young people to seek validation and an illusion of self-worth. I use the word ‘illusion’ because I saw one young woman offering a ‘January sale’ price of £2.50 a month… That’s not empowering, it is downright degrading. I know you want me to soften that statement to make this post more PC, but I just can’t. I find it frankly alarming that you could slap a price tag of £2.50 on pictures of your vagina.

Think about that. I just heard COLLEGE KIDS talking about doing this kind of thing. Perpetuating the ‘do what you want, it’s your body’ mindset is insidious. It is literally true – as I said, we should ALL have sole ownership over our own bodies – but do these kids really know what is best for them or how they’ll feel about this in later life? Some do, granted, but not all. Even worse than that, some know these things but do it anyway because they’re from working class families and they want more money for an iPhone 11 or a PLT order so that they’ll be admired by their peers.

Whether you care to acknowledge it or not, young female (and LGBT+) sexuality is still very much a paradox. We are obsessed with it, but it is held firmly by the hand of shame. This is what everyone knows in their hearts but doesn’t want to come out and say online – people would be horrified. Your hairdresser, your cousin’s girlfriend, your old school mates. Or worse, your parents. 

I’ll be brutally honest, there are times I think the positives and negatives of OnlyFans even out. I mean, people are out here making my annual salary in a month from selling nudes. I work ridiculously hard for a modest amount of money. I want a house, a new car, to travel the world.

Personally, the only factor which overrides the financial benefits is the social cost. I couldn’t have my grandad thinking of me like that. My friends. My colleagues. It wouldn’t matter if I told them ‘I can do what I want, it’s my body’. They’d lose their minds. Grandad would break down and cry. 

 

Of course, that’s worst-case scenario, but when you post intimate content on a public platform it does engender a risk of people in your ‘real life’ seeing it. It might be ‘OnlyFans’ on your subscribers list, but don’t tell me your psycho ex or your brother’s mates couldn’t make a fake account, obtain your nudes and show people or even use them to blackmail you. I’m not going to sugar-coat it, I piss people off now and again. OnlyFans gives rise to a blindspot that could have grave consequences.